The Women Who Raised Me

by Victoria Rowell

  When Monday morning finally came, all I wanted was for the school bus to whisk me away to West Lebanon Elementary. When at last it came, I ran to meet it; my next prayer was that Dorothy wouldn’t follow me anywhere close to where anyone on the bus could see her.

  But she did. Not discreetly. Dorothy stood in plain view, there for everyone and God to see, dressed in that same stained pink gingham dress, a prideful mother taking center stage, waving good-bye right at me.

  Numb by now, I stumbled to a green leather seat and fixed my eyes straight ahead.

  The little girl sitting next to me asked, “Who is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I remember my heart beating at an alarming rate—out of embarrassment but also because I had denied Dorothy as my mother. When I came home later that day from school, I found Agatha pruning her prized Double Syringa shrub. As I walked toward her, Agatha turned to me unprovoked and answered the question in my eyes: “She’s gone.”

  I was fifteen years old the next time I laid eyes on Dorothy. I had been living in and around Boston for much of the previous seven years, with various foster families, while studying at the Cambridge School of Ballet. Again, Agatha met an unannounced Dorothy at the Trailways bus station in downtown Boston and lovingly arranged a meeting for us at an adjacent Howard Johnson’s, lending support by her presence. Nothing of note happened during this brief encounter until it was time to leave, and I excused myself to use the bathroom. I couldn’t help but notice Dorothy following me, several steps behind. Once inside, without warning, she grabbed me, sobbing and involuntarily trembling. I’m not sure why I stood there, immobile, in the face of what seemed hideous. But I did.

  Helplessly, Dorothy gave me a last embrace, mumbling something incoherent. Mother to child. Her cries became louder and more desperate. Grief-stricken and guilty. In my periphery were other women passing this spectacle in the Howard Johnson’s bathroom, stealing glances. I pried Dorothy’s arms from around my fifteen-year-old waist and said, “I can’t be late for ballet class.”

  Her wet face just looked up at me.

  But my last image of her from that meeting came a short while later, as I marched up the cobblestone street to catch my train, when I turned to witness a sight that bound together all the scattered moments of my first fifteen years of life, sending me off into a looming future. There they were, Dorothy and Agatha, arm in arm, linked together in such a way that it was impossible to tell who was supporting whom, both waving, both solemn.

  On that day, I waved once and never looked back because I couldn’t bear to do so.

  A number of years later, during a period in my early twenties, I was ready to look back but it was too late. By this time I had done an exhaustive search and had found my three brothers, not all of them wanting to be found. However, my main ally was my half-brother David Rowell, second-born in our lineage, another motorcycle-riding, guitar-strumming vintage car enthusiast, who had responded to my initial effort to make contact by climbing on his Harley and roaring all the way down from Maine to Manhattan to meet me. David was the one who called me in the spring of 1983 to tell me that our mother, Dorothy, was dying of lung cancer. Grateful for the information, I tried to get in touch with her, but I was kept at bay by Dorothy’s gatekeeper, her spinster sister Lillian, who wanted nothing to do with me.

  Pickled by the vinegar of her meanness, well preserved and energetic for her advanced years, Lillian had no qualms about referring to me as one of the “nigger children” in a letter she had written to Agatha years earlier. Agatha sat me down one evening after Girl Scouts and read it aloud, unedited, so that I could further understand my circumstances and the hard cold truth about the world I lived in. I was seven years old. Lillian’s insufferable bigotry warned that I should never entertain the idea of visiting Dorothy in Maine, stating that I would be an embarrassment. I almost never crossed that line.

  To her only credit, Lillian took care of my mother in the last years of her tortured life. It was there, in Bath, Maine, that my brother David, who was white and lived in a neighboring township, drove me in freezing temperatures in his 1935 Ford pickup so that I could see Dorothy one last time. We stood outside, tossing pebbles at Lillian’s window, calling for our mother, who lay bedridden. Even with the shouted demands of my brother, whom Lillian adored, she remained defiant as we yelled out, “Lillian, let us in!” She refused, answering with a sealed door.

  In September 1983, David phoned me in Boston to say our mother had died. He mentioned that a funeral service was being planned but left the decision of whether to go and the logistics for attending up to me. I immediately realized that although David had accepted me as his sister and his kindness had led him to inform me of our mother’s passing, he would not impose his decisions on the rest of the Collins-Rowell family.

  Calling the funeral director at the Mayo Funeral Home proved to be unsuccessful. “The funeral is private at the request of the Collins family,” he said.

  “But I’m one of Dorothy Collins Rowell’s children.”

  “I’m sorry, but you’re not on the guest list.” He added, “Mrs. Rowell only had three sons.”

  “That’s not correct,” I said as I shook with anger. “She also had three daughters.”

  Apologizing that there was nothing more that he could do, the funeral director hung up.

  With barely enough money for bus fare to travel from Boston to Maine and no money for lodging, I hesitantly called an ex-boyfriend and convinced him to use his credit card to book a room for me at the only motel in the area. I packed a garment bag with my blue-and-white polka-dot dress and my ubiquitous white gloves for my mother’s funeral and I headed out.

  The bus, I soon learned, had a final stop some thirty miles away from the funeral home, but dropped me within walking distance to the motel. As I set off, the starless night sky reminded me that by mid-September, temperatures in coastal Maine can be notoriously unpredictable, often plunging to below freezing, with sudden snow flurries—just like the ones that had begun to fall. Though I was not dressed for the onslaught of early winter, I was too focused on reaching my destination to feel the cutting air.

  I arrived at the motel, which turned out to be a very low frills truck stop. And worse, the woman at the desk had no reservation for me. Obviously, my ex had failed to make the reservation.

  Cold and with no place to sleep, I dug in and curled up on a lobby couch until the night clerk offered, “Hey, Miss, I’ve got a used room that a trucker just checked out of. Do you want it?” I said, “Yes.”

  The next morning I awoke to a long trek before me. I headed up the ramp on to the highway, in the same clothes that I slept in, with my garment bag slung over my left arm. I had a peace of no understanding as I stuck out my thumb, knowing that my Saint Christopher’s medal would protect me.

  I walked backward on the shoulder of the highway, and it wasn’t long before a pickup truck pulled over. We shared few words but the driver was good-natured.

  He dropped me off at the edge of town, blocks away from the funeral home, and so I trudged through the melting snow, passing a diner with a small floral shop. A single bell rang above the door as I entered, causing some customers to turn and stare. With my last dollar, I purchased a single red rose.

  Finally, I reached the door of the Mayo Funeral Home, a 1920s white clapboard structure on a knoll. I knocked, and from behind a lace-curtained window, the funeral director peered out at me, then opened the door in silence. We did not exchange any words except:

  “I’m Vicki Rowell, Dorothy’s daughter.”

  Noticing my garment bag, he said, “Please use my room upstairs to change. You are the first to arrive.” I thanked him and signed the guest book.

  I began to head upstairs but stopped. To my left was Dorothy, lying ever so peacefully, her delicate profile still evident. With all the grace that I could muster, I gently approached, not fearing her lifeless body but rather feeling, even in death, our indisputable bond. We were
finally having our visit. I placed the solitary rose in the crease of the cream-tufted casket, to represent her daughters, two of whom were not present, and went upstairs. I looked around the stark bedroom; everything was neatly placed: comb, brush, and other toiletries. I laid my garment bag across the bed and unzipped it, removing my unwrinkled dress. I looked at myself in a small vanity mirror atop a chest of drawers before sliding on the gloves I wore for reasons I kept so secret, I hadn’t even come into a full understanding of their mystery. I reassured myself and headed downstairs.

  The Collins family had begun to arrive. Their expressions changed from indignant stares to mild-mannered nods, and even smiles. Some whispered comments, like “Oh, she’s not that bad” and “Can we take a picture of you with your mother?”

  The Collinses asked in a matter-of-fact manner as though Dorothy was still alive. I realized this would be the only photograph of my mother and me together, so I obliged with the stipulation that they send me copies. And they did.

  I stood in front of Dorothy’s casket and looked defiantly into the Collinses’ collective lens. Flash went their cameras. At some point, I was joined by my three older brothers. The look on Lillian’s face when she saw me standing with them was one of disgust and disbelief. She sat by herself on the opposite side of the chapel, staring out a stained-glass window. In my mind, Dorothy was having the last say. And so was I.

  Following the service, members of the Collins family invited me to attend the burial. In that moment, I remembered Agatha’s amazing grace, how if it were not for her, I never would have had any relationship with my natural mother. So I simply smiled and said, “No, thank you.”

  David gave me a ride back to the bus station, and I solemnly returned to Boston feeling fulfilled, at least for now. After a lifetime of exclusion and denial, I had found the courage to show up. It was the courage to reveal a family’s secret that I was the human stain on the blue-blood pedigree: Dorothy’s daughter, a thirteenth direct descendant of John Howland, a daughter of Maine. I confronted a part of my family in a funeral home, in Maine, on September 11, 1983. That was the viewing that had truly taken place.

  But maybe there was another reason I didn’t attend her burial. Maybe I wasn’t ready to let her go. In the days and years that followed, I tried to know the mother who had evaded me all that time, not only with visits to her gravesite, and later to the mental asylum in Augusta, but by obtaining her records from the state hospital, and by poring over every hard-won photograph, the first of which I waited ten years to acquire after a request from a family member, or every scrap of a clue I could locate, all of this done in an effort to decode her illness, to rescue her finally.

  In 2002, almost twenty years after her death, it occurred to me in the midst of my self-imposed seclusion that it was time to come out from Dorothy’s shadow, to release myself from the search to know who she was. It was time to truly emancipate, to search for Vicki, and to do so by turning my attention to the gifts I had been given, not only from Agatha Armstead, but from the many surrogate mothers, grandmothers, aunts, fosterers, mentors, grande dames, and sisters who were as much in my blood as was my own blood—the women who raised me.

  It was time to tell their story—and mine.

  PART ONE

  GRANDMOTHERS, MOTHERS, AUNTS

  (1959–1968)

  I do but say what she is. So delicate with her needle: an admirable musician! O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear. Of so high and plenteous wit and invention!

  OTHELLO

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  ONE

  BERTHA C. TAYLOR

  What comes first, before conscious memory, before recorded images, and before the oral accounts that later helped me understand what happened during my first two and a half years of life, is a melody. It’s the sound of a lullaby sung by a woman who loves me infinitely, in a full voice that is untrained but on-key, perhaps with a frill here and there that she would never dare use at choir practice or in church, but allows herself just for me. The melody is accompanied in my primal senses by the sensation of motion, as I am held to her bosom and rocked.

  Fittingly, my life begins with a dance—a waltz!

  Out of this music and movement, other impressions remain of my first foster mother, Bertha Taylor, who received me from the Holy Innocents Home, the orphanage connected to Mercy Hospital in Portland, Maine. When I was three weeks old, Bertha took me to her home, fifteen miles away in the small town of Gray, Maine, with the absolute conviction that she would raise me to adulthood as her own. I know in my cells that this was her maternal plan, just as I know how generously and tenderly every day she kissed my forehead, the nape of my neck, and all my fingers and toes. I know that with her husband at her side and helping, too, she bathed me and changed my diapers for two and a half years, and that with her two best friends, Laura Sawyer and Retha Dunn, and their husbands, created a foundation of love and community that would live on in my self-esteem even when I couldn’t name its origin. I know that Bertha was my mother who bundled me up and took me outside as winter approached to introduce me to my first falling snow, the same mother who encouraged me to take my first steps.

  Here in Gray, Maine, population 2,100 or so, approximately 99.9 percent Caucasian in the early 1960s, in the Taylor home on Greenleaf Street—formerly an old redbrick railroad station that Bertha converted into a ten-room residence—joy was born in my life. This imprinted happiness was a lasting gift that my first foster mother bestowed upon me.

  What I also know, however, is that it was in this same place where I first heard a grown woman crying. That sound of anguish after a prolonged but failed effort to adopt me left a confusing shadow over my childhood—a dark mystery rooted not only in the circumstances of my birth, but in the very history of Maine.

  Perched in the shape of a large ear, as if listening to the secrets of the vast Atlantic Ocean, situated at the most northeastern corner of the American Northeast, the state of Maine is not only the soil from which I sprang, but it ultimately represents my only legal parent. I was literally a daughter of Maine, influenced to an important degree by commonly held, decent values. Mainers on the whole are hardworking, down-to-earth people, devoted to family and community, austere, practical, faithful. Lives depend on survival of the elements and demand a respect for nature. Seasons mattered. We farmed, trapped, shoveled, tapped trees. Some fished, others cut timber and hunted, raised crops, milked cows, slopped pigs, and cleaned coops. We farmers took care of one another and what we had because life depended on it. We had long ago learned to recognize the consequences of failing to do so. We learned how to make things by hand and how to fix them when they were broken.

  Of course, when I was growing up, there were noticeable regional and class differences. Northern or coastal Mainers, like members of the Collins family of Castine or lineages from places like Kennebunk-port, Camden, and Booth Bay Harbor, tended to be wealthier, more educated, more connected to our nation’s founding families; the smaller rural or industrial towns of the south and interior—like Berwick, Gray, and West Lebanon—tended to be poorer and more working class, with lesser known but still long ago planted family names like Lord, Quimby, James, and Shapleigh of Lebanon, Maine. Ahead of their time, establishing early welfare in the United States, before and after the Civil War, these farmers bought and sold farms to aid the sick, the poor, and children, thus creating almsfarms (charity farms). Aside from other distinctions determined by social status, money, education level, and religious affiliation, differences were strong between the part-timers who summered in state and the year-round Mainers. Nonetheless, between most groups of people, a tradition of civility—if not actual tolerance—prevailed.

  So you might conclude that the ills of racial discrimination would never have come to roost in a state known for its political independence and its historically significant antislavery role. In 1820, when Maine was granted statehood as the twenty-third state, it was in fact thanks to the terms of the Mis
souri Compromise—allowing Maine to separate from ownership by Massachusetts and to join the Union as a “free state” while Missouri was to be admitted as a “slave state,” thus maintaining a numerical balance between states that forbade human bondage and those that permitted it. Abolitionist societies soon flourished in Maine, in an atmosphere that empowered Harriet Beecher Stowe, then a resident of Brunswick, to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin—the antislavery rallying cry heard in the years leading up to the Civil War. In some regards, Maine led the way over the next century when it came to laws protecting the rights of its African American citizens. But unfortunately there were exceptions to this tradition—as evidenced by one of Maine’s most shameful chapters, otherwise known as Malaga Island.

  From the time that I was in my twenties and first heard about the tragic history of this obscure island, one among several inhabitable isles dotting Casco Bay near Phippsburg, I was haunted by it. Whether or not what happened on Malaga Island in 1912 has any direct connection to my story, I can’t say, but it helps to expose some of the social and legal contradictions that Bertha Taylor had to battle on my behalf.

  There are different versions of how the founder of Malaga Island, Benjamin Darling, a young, strong, and enterprising man of African descent who had been born into slavery in North Carolina, first arrived in the vicinity of Casco Bay in the 1790s. The version I’ve gleaned from research begins with a nightmarish storm aboard a ship, in which Darling, though shackled, risks his life to save the captain—his actual father and slave master—holding on to the mast throughout the terrifying night. After the shipwreck onto the rocky coast near Phippsburg, the captain rewarded Darling, his own flesh and blood, after all, by giving him his freedom.

  Legend has it that nearby Bear Island got its name after Benjamin Darling next went there and single-handedly fought off a bear attack. Soon after that, records indicate, the heroic Darling married a white Mainer, Sarah Proverbs, purchased what was then Horse Island, and fathered two sons.